N1 Coffee & Co

The Place

The Easy way to get to N1 Coffee & Co is from exit (unsurprisingly) the N1 of the Tsim Sha Tsui MTR station, but my rout is normally a bit more circuitous. This place is my regular coffee spot when I head over to TST to visit Din Tai Fung for lunch (food blog here), so I have to wind my way through the back streets of TST; usually an interesting adventure. It was a little hard to find the first time though, on a corner that doesn’t really identify well on Google Maps!

Walking into the place for the first time was an adventure on it’s own; once you got past the counter and placed your order, there was a sitting area that was eclectic to the max! A hodgepodge of tables of all shapes and sizes as well as seats that are mismatched and include polished logs finish the look. Dotted around the walls are interesting pictures and paraphernalia that are far removed from coffee. I particularly love the wall mural that dominates the back of the room.

Funky music is an added bonus, making that little spot in TST one of the more relaxing spots in arguably the most hectic local in Hong Kong.

The Equipment

A turquoise green The Victoria Arduino VA388 “Black Eagle” espresso machine with a couple of Nuova Simonelli Mythos Clima Pro grinders – one black and one a matching turquoise green. Also present was a large green coffee roaster (of unknown origin).

The Beans

Roasted on premise and badged as N1 the beans are mostly sourced from Ethiopia.

The Package

Predominant colour at N1 Coffee & Co is a lovely turquoise green that beautifully offsets the light caramel brown of the coffee produced. The incredibly precise latte art, a rosetta in the first instance, looked wonderful in the turquoise cup and saucer. There was a sweet and palpable caramel aroma emanating from the cup, which translated into a very, very sweet cup of coffee; it was almost overwhelmingly sweet! There was a medium body with a medium low acidity that had an almost chocolate caramel flavour with very earthy after tones.

It was a beautiful cup of coffee in an amazing setting, it was almost perfect, the key element that ever so slightly detracted was that the milk was a tad too hot. It was a malady that afflicted my takeaway latte as well; but to be honest, it was not so over heated that it burnt out the sweetness of the milk.

I loved that the takeaway cup also had nice and precise latte art; showing the care in the preparation that some coffee joints dispense with for their take away cups. A bold white N1 adorned the turquoise takeaway cup.